To work with monkey’s audio (ape) files you need the “mac” command line tool. This software isn’t available in the Ubuntu repositories so you will need to either compile mac yourself, or alternatively install it from a .deb file.
Installing mac from a .deb file
I’ve put a .deb file for the mac software here (this is for 386 systems). Use it to install mac when you do not want to compile from source. It was compiled on a Kubuntu 6.10 system (works fine with Kubuntu/ Ubuntu 7.04). Save the file by right-clicking on the link and choosing “Save target as” or “Save as”. To install, open a terminal window, navigate to the directory containing the downloaded file, then enter the following:
sudo dpkg -i mac-3.99-u4_b3-1_i386.deb
To confirm the install went ok type “mac” in the terminal window - you should get a listing of mac’s usage details.
[Note: RareWares provides monkey's audio software for Debian users.]
Compiling mac from the source code
You need to install the development tools required to compile a program from source:
sudo aptitude install build-essential
Note that “nasm” (a dependency of mac) must also be installed before attempting to compile mac:
sudo aptitude install nasm
Click here to download the latest version (3.99) of the mac source code from the author’s web page. (I’ve placed a copy of the source here for if the author’s site is down).
Open a terminal window and uncompress the source code, and navigate into the source directory:
tar -zxvf mac-3.99-u4-b5.tar.gz
cd mac-3.99-u4-b5.tar.gz
Configure, make and install the source:
./configure
make
sudo make install
Confirm the install went ok by typing “mac” in the terminal window (should get a listing of mac’s usage details).
10 Comments
thanks for ape ubuntu guide, works great
aidanjm, thankyou from link
works in Ubuntu 7.10 too.
Great.Thanks.
Works well in hardy (alpha4).
Thanks.
I downloaded the source, and it seems that the NASM dependency has been changed to YASM.
This is truly a magnificent post, I’ve googled it a thousand times and have it bookmarked.
However, do you know whether there’s any hope for 64-bit users? Your guide worked perfectly when I was still running i386, but now that I’m on 64-bit, is all hope lost for me? The deb you posted of course won’t install…
Enough monkey business. Finally I can listen to my music!!! Works great in Ubuntu 7.10
If you’re looking for something available via apt-get and friends, there’s a Debian package called libjmac-java. But it appears to be dog-slow in decoding a 100MB .ape file. (At over an hour (and counting), it’s much, much slower than decoding a flac file of comparable size. Maybe it’s just the non-Sun Java(tm) interpreter I’m using? Is ape audio decoding really that slower?
However, since it’s Java-based, jmac can conceivably run on any machine for which a Java virtual machine is available (which probably means all widely available desktop processors).
Once the package is installed, the command to run the main decoder program is:
java -jar /usr/share/java/jmac.jar
Which produces the usage screen containing options for compressing, decompressing and verifying your .ape file.
Hi, thanks for the guide!
As Conor, I’d like to install it in a 64-bit machine. Any suggestion how to do it?
and here’s one more request for 64bit systems…
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[...] Monkey’s Audio (.APE) tan solo tendréis que instalar el paquete (.deb) que se encuentra en ésta página, es decir, éste paquete, y el SoundKonverter lo detectará. Para instalarlo simplemente se [...]
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